Category: linguistics

There are more jokes at All Things Linguistic, but these ones definitely made me giggle (quietly. There are overtired children in the next room.) How does a linguist wish someone a joyful Dec 25th? Merry/Mary/marry Christmas! What do linguists do under mistletoe? Make quadrilabial clicks Which carrot-nosed entity came to life in a particularly strident fashion? Fricative the snowman Who is a grammatical but unattested candidate for pulling a linguist’s

“Christmas” itself has a fairly straightforward etymology. People might have a fear that the religious meaning of the holiday will be overpowered by the gift-giving party, but it’s sort of hard to forget because “Christ” is so prominent in the word. The word comes from the religious event of the day: a mass celebrating Christ’s birth. “-mas” (as well as the standalone word “mass”) comes from Old English “mæsse”, which

Santa. Or is it “Santa Claus” and what about St. Nick? Or Father Christmas? Kris Kringle?? Are these all the same people? Is “Santa” his first name, or what? Growing up in California, I was always a bit confused about the name “Santa”. We have so many towns called “Santa” something. When I learned a bit of Spanish I realized that it was the Spanish word for “saint”. So how

When President Obama gave his December 16th press conference, he ended by saying “Mele Kalikimaka”, which means “Merry Christmas” in Hawaiian. Or does it? It looks suspiciously like the English phrase, doesn’t it? A few extra syllables. And some of the consonants are different. But still almost recognizable. That’s because “Mele Kalikimaka” is not a translation of the words “merry” and “Christmas” into Hawaiian. It’s forcing the English sounds of

Since we’re still in “Advent” rather than the “12 Days of Christmas“, where does Advent come from? Well, Latin. From the adverb “ad” meaning “to” and the verb “venire” meaning “to come”, combining to make a verb meaning “arrive”. But what’s coming? And to where? And is this related to “adventure”? Advent in the church calendar is the season leading up to Christmas. It’s Jesus who’s coming. And he’s coming

When exactly are the 12 days of Christmas? Wait: 12 days? Aren’t you starting a little late? It’s true that there are only 5 days until Christmas. But hasn’t it ever seemed weird that we have the song “12 days of Christmas” that we sing all through December (at least), so for 24 days leading up to Christmas. And our chocolate Advent calendars start on December 1st as well. 24

Main character is a linguist? Better make sure to write a review, every linguist everywhere! Here are my thoughts. (If you haven’t seen Arrival, but want to know the basic story, it’s based on the Ted Chiang story “Story of Your Life“) The basic premise is: a bunch of aliens land on earth, but we have no idea how to talk to them, so the US goverment recruits a linguist

Machine translation has come a long way in the past decade, but computers are still pretty bad at anything other than the most basic straightforward translations from one modern language text to another. The Bible (and other ancient texts) come with a whole set of specific problems that we are still working on doing manually, let alone programming a computer to do it for us. There are two main

I recently got into a discussion with a programmer about machine translation and the Bible. He seemed convinced that with some online crowd-sourcing and a few edits, a machine translation of the Bible could work. And then once we had a translation to work from, updating based on dialect/language change would be super simple. But in reality, no translation is simple, and especially not the translation of a holy text.

This summer I was finally able to climb Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Yosemite is probably my favorite national park because of the magnificent views and great variety of hiking opportunities. And going up into the mountains is an excellent way to escape oppressive summer heat. This summer was a little different from my previous trips because the landmark names have changed because of a contract dispute. The Ahwahnee